My Dilemma

a body horror of the mind (audio poem)

(photo credit to geese goose girl)

+For the full experience, listen and read along with the audio musical companion+

To begin to trace it back, we'd have to go around
a million fractured loops to get to anything 
you might recognize as a straightforward, 
cracked-knuckle truth, by which point
we'd be all exhausted. So let's just start here; 
in the middle of God's own hell. 

Snakes of plastic tubes surround me. 
To breathe, I press a little button,
which sends a signal through a machine 
that pushes oxygen into my lungs.
I can feel the oxygen only because it hurts. 
It brings no relief. 
This is all I do anymore;
remember to breathe. 

Something people used to say to me as a piece of spiritual advice. 
They would tell me that somehow God was in the breath. 
They would tell me about a famous rabbi who once gave a speech
at a gathering of religious leaders, 
and the whole speech was just him breathing in and out
til the breath sounded like the word Yahweh.
I used to think that kind of thing was beautiful, 
to the point of trembling even.
Now it just seems pretentious. 

Whatever road I was on, the highway of redemption
some may've named it, I took a left turn out of nowhere, 
smacked into a concrete divide,
so hard I didn't see stars. 
Instead of a white, I saw a thick red
drain to black. 

My eyes have lost their purpose. 
Where once I could see the world in a version of light—
not the kind, mind you, brushed 
       by Manet and the like, which is to say the light of God—
       one that was kind around the edges. Light that wanted to see me home.   

Now when I want to see, I press a little button
to get a snap shot of this darkened room,
revealing my environment, my wreckage.
I press repeatedly, rapidly, until everything hurts
and then I remember to breathe again. 
 
Perhaps you understand now my dilemma.
To remember, and breathe.
Everything else costs too much.  

There is no more dreaming. 
Hardly the possibility of sleep. 
I can sleep only as long as I can hold my breath,
30 seconds maybe. 

Talking is impossible. 
There is a little button for my mouth and a button for my voice.
But talking is much more than this:  
It springs from the desire to communicate
messages from the tongue,
sent through the teeth. 
There is no little button for 'Talk,'
but somehow thought is not gone. 
And I do not need a machine for it. 
They come to me.
I have become surrounded by them.

I travel in them and through them. I ride them 
around and up through hilled meadows,
and out across glass oceans 
filled with burning stars that look like 
blooming, and over and into summer days 
of red clay shores and secret fishing ponds, 
the ends of trails through thick forests cut 
by winding roads like keller bend and dawns pass 
and bluegrass, kids on bikes with hoods 
over their helmets obscenely shouting as they start
down a hill they realize too late in the steepest thing 
they've ever ridden. A child's thought in the night about 
school in the morning. If Dad's ever coming home. 
Memories with scabs on them, some so beat in
they start to feel dead, like your foot caught between 
rocks, lost in the middle of the woods,
the sun and circulation fading,
looking like severance
and the only option left:

to remember.. and breathe.